Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?

One of the oddest explanations of the Buddha’s teachings is the idea that the cause of suffering is the conceit, “I am.” Wherever there’s a sense of “I am,” there’s going to be suffering. Where there’s no sense of “I am,” there’s going to be no suffering. That’s what they say. They present suffering as a cognitive error. You’ve got your concepts wrong. Where you might normally say, “I hear something. I see something,” you should simply say, “There is hearing. There is seeing.” That should end the problem.

This idea may be related to a passage where the Buddha tells Bāhiya that “In the seen there should only be the seen, in the heard only the heard, in the sensed only the sensed, in the cognized only the cognized.”

But is it really true that there’s no suffering when there’s no sense of “I”? The people who explain it this way say, “Well, there’s no responsibility. You don’t have to do anything with the seen or the heard. You have no duties with regard to it.” But look at reality. Dogs suffer without any sense of “I am.” Babies suffer without any sense of “I am.”

This idea raises a whole host of questions. One would be, “How could you function if you weren’t taking on the responsibility of doing something with what you see and you hear?” As one person once put it to a monk who taught in line with this school of thought, “Have you ever put on trousers and gone to work and tried out these teachings in the real world?”

Then there’s that question, “Is ‘I am’ purely suffering? Is it simply a cognitive error? Or do we have a reason for applying this sense of ‘I am’?” When you find something you like, something you dislike, if you have a sense that you are capable of doing something about that, it helps to relieve a lot of suffering.

This is the “I” as the producer. “I’m capable of doing something with things that I like and things I don’t like: sights I like, sounds I like, or sights and sounds I don’t like. If I like them, I may have it within my power to extend them, improve them. If I don’t like them, I can change them to something I like better.”

So there’s a sense of power that comes with the sense of “I.” And you can’t just wipe it away by saying, “Well, I have no responsibilities, so I don’t need that sense of ‘I.’” You wouldn’t really be able to function in this world.

But the fact that we’re driven by our likes and dislikes suggests that maybe the problem is there, with the likes and the dislikes. This is where the Buddha’s actual teachings come in. His definition of the cause of suffering is not the conceit that “I am.” It’s the cravings that leads to becoming: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming.

You crave sensual fantasies. When you see something you like, you crave the ability to figure out in what world it exists, and how you can take on an identity in that world. That’s craving for becoming.

As for craving for non-becoming, you’ve found yourself in a world with an identity, and either you don’t like the world or you don’t like your identity. Or what you thought you wanted in that world turns out to be not worth wanting at all. So you want to destroy that world. That would be a case of trying to find happiness by destroying any “I am” in that world. But as the Buddha pointed out, in wanting to destroy it, you take on a new identity of “I am.”

So the real question is: Why are we driven by our likes and dislikes? Is there some way we can learn how not to be driven by them?

This relates to the Buddha’s own explanation of his teachings to Bāhiya. There’s a sutta in the Samyutta, 35:95, where a monk who’s ardent and resolute — in other words, he’s practicing hard — comes to see the Buddha and asks for a teaching in brief. He gets the same teaching that the Buddha gave to Bāhiya, and the Buddha asks him how he understands it. The monk then explains what he understands: Say, for the phrase, “In the seen is only the seen” — the next step you have to avoid adding onto the seen is the sense of what you like about the seen, what you find endearing, and so on with the other senses. So the problem is our craving for what we like. Then, based on the proliferation that goes along with what we like, we find ourselves running against what we don’t like. The mind is overcome with greed on one hand and annoyance on the other hand. That’s how it suffers.

So the trick there is to learn how not to focus on what you like about these things. But here again, it’s not simply a matter of telling yourself not to like them. That gets very, very dry, very quickly. Instead, the Buddha gives you something else to like: the skills of the path—taking virtue as a skill, concentration as a skill, discernment as a skill.

After all, what we like about what we see and hear, etc., is what we can make out of these things, either in terms of fantasies or a sense of possession or the changes we can make in the world—the same as when an artist looks at a canvas, looks at some paint, and likes the canvas and the paint: not because of what they are just there, but because of what an artist can make out of them.

We’re artists of our lives all the time. So the Buddha says to become an artist in terms of the path. You learn to enjoy the skills that come when—in cases where you ordinarily would have, say, broken a precept—you’ve learned how not to. Or you could have harmed somebody but now you’ve learned how to avoid that harm. There’s a joy that goes with that.

Especially with the concentration, as you begin to gain a sense of mastery over how you breathe, how you perceive the breath, how you can play with the breath energies in the body, how you can figure out how to get the mind to get more and more still as you peel away the various layers of concentration: There’s a real joy that comes with that. As you get more enthralled with these skills, you find yourself less and less interested in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, even a lot of your ideas. You find that the skills of the concentration, and then again the skills of discernment, are more enthralling.

Again, this falls in with that principle: We’re more attached to things we make than we are with the things we simply experience in a passive way. A lot of things we like about our experiences are what we can make out of them. So when you find that making good states of mind is more enthralling, more enjoyable, than what you can make out of sights, sounds, etc., it helps to wean you off those sights and sounds. Your attachment gets centered more and more in what you can do, the abilities you develop with the qualities of the mind. Your sense of agency gets more and more interesting the wider your range of capabilities.

Now, there will be a strong sense of “you” as the person who’s doing this, the person who’s enjoying this. This is why the Buddha says that a healthy sense of self is a necessary part of the path. You don’t just tell yourself right off the bat, “There’s no ‘I’ here,” and then try to deal with the convoluted twists and turns of what that gets you involved in. You’re very frank about the sense that, yes, you are doing the path, and, yes, there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes with that. And the Buddha encourages that. You see that you’re able to avoid harming yourself and you’re finding that there are more and more subtle levels of harm that you can avoid. The Buddha says to take joy in that — not to be satisfied, but to take joy and to continue training.

This is why that sense of self is a necessary part of the path. You want to enjoy that sense of self because it helps to wean you off your fascination with pleasures that come from playing with sights and sounds, or just registering sights and sounds. Then, as your concentration develops, you find that you get more and more sensitive to the fact that you are fabricating it. Even the subtlest levels of pleasure that come with concentration do have to be maintained. That’s when the mind begins to incline to the deathless, something even better.

When you’ve had an experience of the deathless, you realize that it’s totally beyond concepts. Still, the arahant, after coming back from that experience, will use continue to use the concept of “I”: “I saw this.” “I did this.” “They did this to me.” “I,” “Me”: The arahant still uses them. But the arahant’s relationship to these concepts, and to concepts in general, is going to be very different from what it was before.

Arahants relate to things disjoined from them. Exactly how they’re disjoined, we’re going to understand only when we become arahants ourselves. But it’s a good sense of being disjoined. It’s not a sense of being lost or what we call “dissociation.” There’s a really solid sense of well-being that doesn’t require that you feed on anything.

That was the problem all along: the feeding. The feeding on your likes and dislikes, the desires and the passions—the desire and passion in the craving, and then the desire and passion in the clinging itself as you keep on feeding: Those things are now gone. And that’s why there’s an end of suffering.

So don’t just throw out your sense of “I” right away. Learn how to use it properly. Use your sense of agency. Gain a sense of what you can do through the practice, the opportunities that come with developing a more and more competent sense of “I”—an “I” with more and more skills, an “I” that helps to detach you from your fascination with sensual pleasures and heads you in the right direction.

There will, of course, come a point where you let it go. But get the most out of it before you throw it away. As the Ajaan Lee would say, “Let go like a rich person. Don’t let go like a pauper.” Paupers don’t have anything before or after letting go.

Some people say they’re happy when they don’t have to have any responsibility for dealing with sights and sounds. But as long as the duties of the four noble truths are not done, their duties are not done. They’re just shirking their duties, saying, “Well, I’m just going to find joy in not doing what I have to do or in telling myself I don’t have to do anything.” But the duties haven’t been done yet. Suffering hasn’t been comprehended. Its cause hasn’t been abandoned. Cessation hasn’t been realized. The path hasn’t been developed.

There are duties that go with the path, and whatever stress comes with the duties — and the Buddha does admit there is stress in following the path — it’s rewarded all along the way, and more than rewarded when you get to the end.